Woman Grows Jeans

Part of Climate Action! Festival: Women in Activism
Includes a post-film Q&A with Justine Aldersey-Williams

In the industrial heartland of British textiles, a community sets out to do something unprecedented - grow jeans from scratch. With hopes of helping regenerate harmful fashion systems, they begin planting flax and indigo, spinning yarn, and weaving cloth. When the dream of bringing them to market falters, the challenge of creating a prototype is taken on by Justine Aldersey-Williams, transforming the experiment into a personal rite of passage.

What unfolds is a tender, radical act of reconnection: to land, lineage, lost skills, and the ‘more-than-human’ world. Woman Grows Jeans explores what it really means to rewild our world, our wardrobes—and ourselves. At once a protest and a prayer, this is slow fashion as provocation: sown by hand, infused with love, and stitched with hope. For anyone who’s ever wondered if a different future is possible, this pioneering story shows that the power to create change is still in our hands.

Justine Aldersey-Williams is a Wirral-based regenerative clothing activist, botanical textile dyer, and founder of the Northern England Fibreshed. From her studio The Wild Dyery in Hoylake, she has taught natural fabric dyeing to thousands of students worldwide, sharing skills that connect people to the land through plant-based colour.